Today marks the first time in probably 20 years that none of the computing devices in my home are PCs. The homebrew PC tower unit used until recently by Son#2 is being shipped out after being stripped of anything useful. He now uses a Raspberry Pi and screen to RDP into a virtual desktop in the lab. Looking around at ... Read More »

Reading this recent article on ZDNet I was struck by the pointlessness of Google’s 1TB of user storage offering. This may seem like a bold statement, but let’s look at the figures and the offering. If you buy a Chromebook Pixel, it comes with 1TB of Google Drive storage for three years. Sadly the ZDNet article in question goes on ... Read More »

The last few weeks have seen a couple of important flash technology announcements. They are important as they bring two of the “Big 5/6” storage vendors up to speed in a market that is already pretty well occupied. Unfortunately all of these announcements are coupled with hyperbole, figure hiding and in some cases, bare-faced lies. Company N Let’s look first ... Read More »

Nexenta, the software-only storage company received a further $24m in funding last week and had a swap around of their top execs, with former CEO Evan Powell moving to Chief Strategy Officer. Nexenta have been described by some (including themselves) as Software Defined Storage, but we’ll park that definition for now and highlight the fact that Nexenta don’t sell hardware ... Read More »

Without a clear definition, it’s difficult to answer the question posed as the title of this post. Last time I mentioned Hitachi, VPLEX from EMC, Nutanix and SolidFire. Since posting the last blog entry, I’ve had representations from Coraid (check out this presentation) and Zadara Storage (yet to be evaluated). So who else is claiming SDS? I’d be interested to ... Read More »

The title of this post could quite easily have been asked in reverse – is Cloud ready for the enterprise? Either way, understanding what IT means to the Enterprise is fundamental to answering the question. The attached diagram (I’ll hold short of calling it an infographic) explains how the Enterprise has evolved over the last 30 years. In the days ... Read More »